From Young Team to Atomic: Stuart Braithwaite on twenty years of Mogwai

It was yet another album from the Scottish four-piece to crack the top twenty album charts, something perhaps no-one - not least Mogwai themselves - would have expected after forming in the collapsing industrial heartland of Lanarkshire in 1995. An instrumental record about the terror of a nuclear holocaust? Aye, that's a unit-shifter if ever one was.

We took the opportunity of the release of Atomic to speak to the band's Stuart Braithwaite on the past twenty years. In this two-part interview, Braithwaite will also answer questions from fellow artists such as Kelly Lee Owens and Wild Beasts, while Barry Burns talks to Best Fit about Mogwai's latest release.

Hi Stuart, did you ever expect Mogwai to last twenty years?

“We never really thought about it to be honest. There was never a time when we thought about stopping, so if you don’t stop….you continue!”

There were always bands forming in the area we’re both from, despite it being a fairly deprived place to be brought up – did you feel like you always had opportunities?

“I think Lanarkshire – and Glasgow as well – specifically, there had been such a history of other people starting bands and making it really international. One of the first bands I got into was Jesus and Mary Chain, although by that point they had probably moved down south there was still this idea of these were guys from East Kilbride…and they portrayed themselves as pretty glamorous.”

It made it feel attainable...

“Yeah. They were still from East Kilbride, and if you’ve ever been there, there isn’t a Lower East Side, you know what I mean? So there was always the idea that we could do it, and there was no reason we thought we couldn’t! When you’re a wee guy, you have these ideas and if you saw that someone had a record in a shop they definitely had to be a superstar but them, Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub - they were a subconscious factor but it just felt that it wasn’t completely inconceivable that we could make a record, go abroad and all that stuff.”

Where did the Mogwai sound come from?

“We all had and still do have a pretty diverse taste in music, but there were a few bands we were all into like Sonic Youth, God Machine, My Bloody Valentine and Joy Division. Anything we did was never that premeditated to be totally honest. It was often a case of trying something: if it was good, keep doing it, if it was bad try something else. Also, we were just wee guys so we probably thought it sounded like something completely different to what it actually did!”

Do you remember what led you to Paul Savage and Chem 19 studios for those first recordings which made up Young Team?

“I think we’d met Paul somewhere…we’d been playing a lot of gigs locally and there was a really strong scene so we probably met Paul at a gig and he suggested it! Our first gig was in Glasgow at 13th Note, when Alex Kapranos was the booker; we’d been playing around I guess so Chem 19 was perfect for me as I was still staying with my folks in the Clyde Valley.”

The Mogwai four-piece became five when Barry Burns joined for the band's second album Come On Die Young…

“He joined during it; he was there for rehearsals but I don’t think he was there for the entire recording, I could be wrong. He’ll be like ‘I was there all the time’, raging at me. I seem to recall he wasn’t there the whole time…played on everything, though.”

What did Barry bring to the band?

“Barry’s a great player; he’d been at the Royal Acadamy [of Music and Drama, in Glasgow, know at the time as RSAMD]…or the Conservatoire as it’s now known, which he refuses to even say! So he could really play a lot, which helped us. He could arrangements, song writing…it pushed us all a bit harder and set a bit of a standard.”

And that led to the quiet-loud dynamic disappearing….

“Yeah, I think… to use the local terminology we had ripped the arse out of it a bit. We didn’t just want to repeat ourselves all the time. Seems a bit daft now, but there was an element of surprise at the time…with ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ and ‘Like Herod’ I guess people maybe weren’t used to hearing that.”

You famously put on a show at Rothesey pavilion for the launch of Rock Action; a ticket got you there and back with a ferry and bus thrown in. I was extremely sick after that show…

“It was a lot of people’s first experience of Buckfast…a lot of people came from really nice parts of England and ended up losing the plot on Buckie hahaha!”

You’ve mentioned that Happy Songs for Happy People is your favourite Mogwai record, can you say why?

“It’s hard to pin down; it was an intense recording. We did it in three weeks and kinda just knuckled down and battered in. Our manager had just quit, it was quite an uncertain time and I think we reacted to that by just putting everything into the record. With the time that’s passed you can look back and see that the main thing was the music, but there’s also what it meant to us as a band as well.”

Mogwai have become something of a political band, with your involvement in the Yes campaign for independence, the fight to scrap Trident…were you always political?

“I definitely am now, but to be totally honest I wasn’t back then…maybe in the way that most people are, noticing things and reacting to those changes. I dunno if it’s changed the band at all;we were all signing on at the time I suppose and I don’t know if you’d get away with that now! I think the attitude to being Scottish has changed; we used to kinda apologise for being Scottish!”

There was a huge swing to SNP from Labour in the 2015 General Election, even in places that were always staunch Labour heartlands in Scotland...

“They probably still would be [Labour seats] if it wasn’t for the Better Together campaign. Before the referendum I had a lot of friends who are Labour politicians. They’d always be tweeting that they were gaining votes and councils… and then they just totally shot themselves in the face.”

Do you think the Scottish Parliament and devolution has led to more funding and opportunities for artists in Scotland?

“I don’t know if there’s any more arts funding but I think there’s more confidence…maybe this is the mists of time but to me it seemed that to be taken at all seriously you had to be written about by the London press, you had to be played on national radio. There were a few people who would support us and the Scottish bands…Peter Easton who did Beat Patrol [on BBC Radio Scotland] was the first guy to play our single, but – and again this goes back to the attitude of being from Scotland – it was treated like ‘local’ bands. It was like, unless you’re getting played in London you’re a local band. That goes back to the overarching attitude of Scotland as a region…and I think that’s been completely blown out the water.”

Mogwai came together at around the same time as Britpop, and you never hid your feelings about that scene

“We were never…and this isn’t exactly a headline…really into that music. I guess probably at the time what annoyed me – I say me because Dominic [Aitchison, bass] and Martin [Bulloch, drums] wouldn’t have given two fucks – was that the bands who were getting attention were not that great. It was the post-Pulp and Blur bands…but it was something to kick against, something to moan about. We were really bratty when we were young and it probably got us some press because we were willing to say something outrageous about someone, make a T-shirt, do something daft like that…but it never really bothered me.”

It must have spurred you on a bit, though?

“It was a bit of a driving factor with the band; there was this music but there was also this sort of Little Britain anti-Americanism going on. All that stuff which was important to us, Sub Pop, Nirvana, Mudhoney…to someone young reading this now they might not even understand why this was important. The way that culture was so dictated by the weekly music press or the BBC’s Evening Session...it must seem quaint to people now. ‘Why didn’t you go and find out’…you couldn’t! It was a closed shop, it was a monopoly…and at times it was a monopoly controlled by people who didn’t even like music that much.”

Can you pinpoint any high points for the band?

“There’s been a few high points; I remember the first big gig we did, supporting Pavement at the Astoria. It was just…revelatory. Before that we’d only ever played in bars, and then suddenly we’re playing to probably a thousand people. It was so many more people than we’d played to before, and it just felt like the music was making sense. Even things like putting out our own records again from Hardcore…that process being so much more than just the songs; that was a really good feeling.”

Atomic is out now on Rock Action Records and Mogwai will be playing the album live later in the year. Read part two of the interview later in the week.